Snapshot Of A Fishing Life

At any given time, there are a half-dozen or more vintage tackle boxes for sale on EBay. The majority of these come from estate sales or from families cleaning out basements and attics, and most of them are chock-full of tackle, left as-it-was the last time the owner went fishing. In some cases, that may have been years or even decades ago. There's an entire subculture of tackle collectors who scour these listings looking for valuable vintage lures, and you can tell when they find one because the price of the auction jumps dramatically. That's all well and good, but for me the fun in these old tackle boxes isn't so much finding a rare popper I can add to my collection or sell for hundreds of dollars, it's getting a glimpse into one man's fishing life; unwrapping the mystery of how he ended up with the tackle he did, how he used it and what it meant to him. In some sense, the tackle box is like a snapshot of the fisherman.

While there are certainly vintage plastic tackle boxes out there, I limit myself to metal exclusively. First of all, almost no metal tackle boxes were manufactured after the mid-70's, so any metal box you come across is going to be at least 40 years old and probably owned by an "old school" fisherman. Further, I like the classic look and heft of metal tackle boxes, although after purchasing a couple from EBay it becomes pretty apparent why plastic quickly took over as the material of choice. The very nature of fishing guaranteed that these boxes were subjected to wet conditions and any well-used box is going to be at some stage of rusting away, especially the bottom panel. I also try to limit my purchase price to $50 or less. More than that and a collector has seen something he likes and I will find myself in a bidding war I am not going to win.

When the box arrives in the mail, the first thing I do is take a few pictures of it in the undisturbed state. I would like to believe that everything is exactly the way the fisherman left it, but the sellers often rearrange things to better show the contents. Then I do a quick visual inventory and get a general impression of what sort of fisherman it belonged to and what sort of fishing he did. The box featured in these pictures was a little strange in that the owner had a lot of big, well-used stickbaits, but also had several unopened or barely used smaller Mepps. The type of line is also a clue both to the era and the type of fishing. This box contained both nylon braid, which rapidly fell from favor in the late-60's and mono-filament, but again the sizes were inconsistent. Four pound mono and 15-20 pound braided nylon. My guess is that he was probably a long-time bait caster going for bass, pike or other larger fish, but had recently started dabbling with a lighter spinning rod for panfish.  

A couple of "hidden gem" items from the box included a neat metal container of splitshot, what appears to be a hand-carved articulated crankbait and something called a Trav-L-Bob (Your passport to a new experience in fishing) which seems to be a sort of a mini planer board for bait casting. The box also contained the sort of junk that can be found in any decent tackle box; random knots of line with sinkers, kooks, swivels and bobbers still attached, a pair of old fashioned nail cutters that were so rusted I couldn't get them open and the ubiquitous (and practically useless) stamped metal fish scaler. If I add the value of all the items up, I would probably come somewhere close to the $40 (plus shipping, I think I must be the only vendor on EBay that ships for free) I paid for the tackle box at auction. So, now that I have the tackle cleaned and sorted will I just put it on a shelf and admire it? Of course not. That's not what the fisherman who put this together would have wanted. He would have wanted his stuff to have a second life and so it will... on my next fishing trip.